The Department for Education has repeated calls for schools to provide it with daily attendance figures after revealing that more than one in four are still not doing so.
In an update, circulated to schools today, the department said that 73 per cent of schools are now reporting attendance and invited more to do so.
This figure is a 3 per cent rise in the number of schools reporting attendance data to the department as of 8 November.
Commenting on today’s figures, children’s commissioner Dame Rachel de Souza told Tes she was “pleased” with the schools signed up to report attendance, but that she wanted to see improvement.
“I want to see every child in school, every day, with the support they need to learn,” she said. “I want to see all schools sign up as soon as possible; that will help all of us working with and for children to provide them with the support they need to attend school regularly and intervene early where a child isn’t.”
She added that “getting children back into school and attending consistently is an absolute priority for me”.
The information-gathering is part of a departmental push to improve attendance, an issue that has been exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Last year, then education secretary Nadhim Zahawi committed to making the issue a priority, culminating in a December convening of an “attendance alliance” featuring leading figures in the sector, including Ofsted chief inspector, Amanda Spielman, and Dame Rachel.
The DfE has brought forward a raft of proposals to support a rise in attendance, including a new national framework for issuing fixed penalty notices over pupil absence.
According to the most recent government data, the attendance rate was 93.5 per cent across all schools in the week commencing 7 November 2022.
Schools have also been encouraged to compare their attendance rates with others across the country after the government launched its online attendance dashboard in September.
The initiative is one of a number of attendance drives being pushed by the department.
Others include a one-to-one attendance pilot in Middlesbrough, which aims to provide tailored support to over 1,600 persistently and severely absent pupils over a three-year period.
